Meh

Have you seen the word "meh" online? It is a new interjection used to express indifference or boredom. Sometimes it is used as a verb or an adjective.

Since the word doesn't appear in mainstream dictionaries, it is hard to confirm its etymology.  But it is included in the online Wiktionary and it in the online Urban Dictionary.

Samples usages:
“What do you want to do tonight?”
“Meh. I don't care.”

"That movie was great." 
“Meh. I’ve seen better.”

Some websites give a Yiddish origin because it is similar to the interjection "feh" which is supposed to be a transliteration of the sound a goat makes.

Wikipedia says that meh appeared back in 1992 on a Usenet forum.

It seems that the first print usage was in the Canadian Edmonton Sun in 2003: "Ryan Opray got voted off Survivor. Meh."



I believe the first time I encountered it must have been on TV's The Simpsons in the1992 episode "Homer's Triple Bypass." Sadly, that is Lisa's explanation of her generation's reaction to things like her father's open heart surgery.

It shows up in a few other episodes too. When Homer tries to get the kids away from the TV and out to an amusement park. Lisa and Bart reply 'meh' and keep watching TV and when Homer asks again, Lisa says "We said MEH! M-E-H, meh!' "

X and O Hugs and Kisses

Have you ever added "hugs and kisses" to a card or letter by adding some X or O characters?  It has come to be that  O = Hug and X = Kiss. But why?

According to urbandictionary.com, looking at those characters as representing two people from a bird's eye view, makes the "O"into the arms of those persons hugging each other while the "X" is evocative of two people kissing each other. I don't buy that origin story.

But hugs and kisses, as in  XOXO, is a term used for expressing sincerity, faith, love, or good friendship at the end of a written correspondence and now in email or text messages.

I did some searching online and there are far older and more complicated origin tales.

Putting X's on correspondence to mean kisses seems to date back to the Middle Ages. At that time, putting a Christian cross on documents or letters was supposed to signify sincerity, faith, and honesty. You then placed a literal kiss upon the cross by the signer as a display of their sworn oath.

Even earlier, when most people could not read or write, the 'X' was placed on documents as a signature and a kiss placed upon it as a show of their sincerity.

Chi Rho

The Chi Rho, often represented in the simpler form of a letter 'X', was also used as a holy symbol throughout Christian history as it represented the Greek word for Christ ΧΡΙΣΤΟΣ.  This also led to the practice of using the letter 'X', once again kissed, as a way of displaying a sacred oath.

The 'O' is far more modern and is of North American descent. Jewish immigrants arriving to the United States, and whose first language was Yiddish, would use an 'O' to sign documents - deliberately not using the sign of the cross. Shopkeepers would often use an 'O' when signing documents, in place of an 'X'.

But how that became a "hug" is something I have not discovered.  Post a comment if you have more to add to this story.

Kilroy Was Here

The WWII generation is getting smaller, but they will know about the phrase "Kilroy was here" which was well known during and after WWII.  But for younger readers, the phrase and its origin might be unknown.

Its origins are debated, but the phrase and the distinctive accompanying doodle of a bald-headed man (sometimes depicted as having a few hairs) with a prominent nose peeking over a wall with the fingers of each hand clutching the wall — became associated with American soldiers during World War II.

It became what we would term today a "meme" though that term didn't appear until 1976.

The legend was that "Kilroy" was a shipyard worker during the war who worked as a checker at the Fore River Shipyard in Quincy. His job was to go around and check on the number of rivets completed. He would count a block of rivets and put a check mark in semi-waxed lumber chalk, so the rivets wouldn't be counted twice. When Kilroy went off duty, the riveters would erase the mark.

To keep things more honest, he started to put his check mark on each job he inspected, but added 'KILROY WAS HERE' in king-sized letters next to the check, and eventually also added the sketch of the face with the long nose peering over the fence and that became part of the Kilroy message.

Kilroy's inspection "trademark" was seen by thousands of servicemen who boarded the troopships the shipyard produced. It connected with servicemen and they picked it up and spread it all over Europe and the South Pacific.

Before the war's end, "Kilroy" had been everywhere from Fort Dix, New Jersey, to Berlin and Tokyo. It was somewhat mysterious but clear that Kilroy had "been there first."

At the war's end, in 1945, an outhouse was built for the exclusive use of Franklin Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill at the Potsdam conference.  The first user was Stalin, who emerged and asked his aide (in Russian), "Who is Kilroy?"

In 1946 the American Transit Association, through its radio program, "Speak to America ," sponsored a nationwide contest to find the real Kilroy, offering a prize of a real trolley car to the person who could prove himself to be the genuine article.

Almost 40 men stepped forward to make that claim, but only James Kilroy from Halifax , Massachusetts had evidence of his identity. To help prove his authenticity, James Kilroy brought along officials from the shipyard and some of the riveters. He won the trolley car, which he gave to his nine children as a Christmas gift and set it up as a playhouse in the Kilroy yard in Halifax , Massachusetts.

In the United Kingdom, the graffiti is known as "Mr Chad" or just "Chad", and the Australian equivalent to the phrase is "Foo was here". 

In the 1950s, even non-soldiers took up the phrase and added the graffiti logo in unlikely places. Legend has it that it appears atop Mt. Everest, on the Statue of Liberty, the underside of the Arc de Triomphe and that it is scrawled in the dust on the moon.

It was engraved into the WWII Memorial in Washington, DC.

The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread

Although it is fading from usage these days, the phrase that something is "the greatest thing since sliced bread" is a fairly common idiom in America meaning something is a great new invention.

The actual sliced bread was sold first in 1928. Before that, most people baked their own bread, or bought from bakers in solid loaves.

Then along comes Otto Frederick Rohwedder, a jeweler from Davenport, Iowa, who had been working for years to perfect his bread slicer.

When he tried selling it to bakeries, they rejected it claiming that pre-sliced bread would get stale and dry before it could be eaten.

He tried some solutions like a crazy idea to keep slices together with hatpins and then hit upon wrapping the sliced bread in waxed paper.

He finally got a baker in Chillicothe, Missouri to try out the slicing and wrapping machine.They ran ads in the daily newspaper "Announcing: The Greatest Forward Step in the Baking Industry Since Bread was Wrapped — Sliced Kleen Maid Bread."

Sales were great. Customers loved the convenience and the consistently sized slices.

Please and Thank You

In English, we say these words all the time (hopefully!) and we teach our children them at an early age, but did you ever wonder where these two courtesies originated?


I discovered the etymologies of “please” and “thank you”in an unlikely place - a book titled Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber . Graeber is an anthropologist and the book goes against conventional wisdom by showing that before there was money, there was debt.

But, on to the words...

Our English “please” is short for the phrase “if you please” and “if it pleases you to do this.” It is the same in most European languages (French si il vous plait, Spanish por favor).

Graeber says that its literal meaning is “you are under no obligation to do this.”  When someone says "Would you please hold the door open for me?" you are under no obligation to do so. Well, maybe there a "social obligation" but this little informal order isn't quite an order with that please attached to it.

I would not have guessed that the English, “thank you” derives from “think.  In fitting with Graeber's actual book topic,  the original idea was to mean “I will remember what you did for me” and in other languages (Portuguese obrigado for example) it is frequently like the English “much obliged” which does imply that "I am in your debt.”

The French merci is even more obvious coming from “mercy” (as in begging for mercy).

Related phrases are “you’re welcome,” or “it’s nothing” (French de rien, Spanish de nada) suggests that there is no debt.

Graeber points out that in history “please” and “thank you” only came into common usgae  with the commercial revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and mostly among the middle classes. It became part of the languages of shops, and offices, and later spread to general usage.